The Social Ecosystem and The Old Spice Guy
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PrintThis is not another analysis of the Old Spice Guy campaign. At this point, if you haven’t formed your own opinion you’re not interested and you will not be swayed by my thinking on the topic.
The point of this post is that I have seen more discussion about what class of marketing/pr/CRM/advertising/you-name-it that this campaign falls into. If you look at posts like this one from Wim Rampen,this one from Harish Kotadia, PHd, and this one from Prem Kumar you will see little discussion about the effectiveness of the strategies and tactics and instead see a debate about if this campaign is Social CRM, Social Media Marketing, Social Marketing, Public Relations, and on and on and on. At best we have a lack of clarity about these concepts, at the worst we have an industry-wide confusion made worse by:
- Lack of clear and agreed upon definitions.
- Lack of agreed upon guidance and “standards”.
- Vendors who are promoting Social CRM solutions with little clarity about how these solutions really fit any core set of definitions and capabilities.
Organizations and individuals simply want to find clear pathways for reaching their goals. They want consistent language and terminology. They want easy to understand strategies and tactics. They want case studies they can learn from and use to justify spend to the budget holders. They want to understand how their Social Organization can best interact with their Social Customers to meet their goals.
In short…. They want The Social Ecosystem. Join me and The Lab as we explore and weigh in on where we fall short. Together we can make sense of all of this so that you can do the one thing that matters most to your organization…. Reach your goals.
John
John Moore
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5 comments »
Mitch Lieberman
I believe you crossed a line with this one
John,
Instead of sharing your thoughts directly with the authors on their posts, you feel is better to be dismissive on your own posts - how noble. Did you even read Wim's post? By your comment, I would find it difficult to believe you did, or you do not believe in traditional silly metrics like Customer Lifetime Value; from Wim's post:
"Concepts like Customer Lifetime Value, share of wallet etc provide us with some good indicators to assess which Customers are (potentially) our most precious ones. The general thought is, that if you understand why these Customers are your most valuable Customers you can try to find or create more of these Customers. It’s not difficult to understand that this would seriously increase your marketing ROI."
If you had spent the time to read on further, you might have noticed an actual case study referenced for the German banking industry:
"I firmly believe that Word of Mouth is most valuable when it is Customer generated. Nevertheless research on the impact of a referral program in the German banking industry (PDF), proved that the Customers acquired through such a program proved to be 16 % more valuable (in terms of Lifetime Value) than Customer acquired through other campaigns."
Wim is a highly respected author, a really smart person and more than capable of defending himself, he does not need me (I learn a lot from him). But, to your bullet points and suggestions - Accepted definitions and industry standards are used, case studies are referenced, and Wim (nor Prem or Harish) is a vendor.
I agree that Organizations want to reach their goals, we all do. That said, there is no reason to throw away years of learning, plenty of industry standards to build on in order to match the needs of the Social Customer. I am a strong believer in Social CRM, I am also a believer in making sure we do not simply try and reinvent everything all at once.
Michael Moaz says it quite well:
"The crucial derivative benefit of analyzing what the customer community is saying about your Four Ps is that you will be better able to focus on where to invest in marketing, sales and service. Where should you focus? What is a process gap and what is a technology gap? Which problems are about real-time decision support and which about lack of channel integration. Again: this is Intention Social CRM, and it works."
-Mitch
Mitch Lieberman
President and CEO
Comity Technology Advisors
comityadvisors.com
John Moore
Dismissive?
Mitch, Wim and I did discuss this post and yes,I read all three posts thoroughly (multiple times actually).
It is not a question, however, of ignoring the past as much as it is in listening to the ongoing confusion. We agree to disagree and,if anyone was offended that I selected their posts I apologize.
However,the point is one I believe in as well. The fact that people can not point at something and answer simply if it is,or is not,Social CRM,is a problem. The fact that people cannot point at a vendors solution and answer the same problem is a problem.
John F Moore
CEO
The Social Ecosystem Lab, aka "The Lab"
My Blog: http://thejohnfmoore.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/JohnFMoore
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/johnfmoore
Skype: cto.john.moore
Mitch Lieberman
Re: Dismissive
John,
I used the word dismissive as it represents my sentiment. I apologize if that offends you. Here are the reasons:
1 - You chose to create a new post, without engaging the authors on their venue,
2 - You chose to ignore the high value of the concepts introduced or highlighted by Wim (or Prem) focusing only on one small component (which is the one we can agree to disagree)
3 - You failed to recognize that both Prem and Wim used the Old Spice campaign itself as a case study itself (and offered others) to help bring clarity
If you want clarity in absolutes, then you will need to go way back. First you can make sure there is consensus on the definition of Marketing or more fitting here, Experiential Marketing The campaign could be either.
With respect to adding confusion, most organization who are looking to connect their Organizations to Customers in the Age of the Social Web are asking for Social CRM - but that is my term, many do not care what it is called, they just have a job to do and I help them do it.
-Mitch
Mitch Lieberman
President and CEO
Comity Technology Advisors
comityadvisors.com
Bob Thompson
social business
Gentlemen,
With the ease of blogging and re-blogging through syndication, it seems we have more posts and fewer conversations. Or maybe more fragmented conversations.
Hopefully the Old Spice campaign can help us learn what Social CRM is or isn't. The majority opinion (sorry, Harish) is that it's just a social media marketing campaign. See the discussion on Social CRM pioneers at http://bit.ly/bZqOcL.
I think John is right that there is still considerable confusion about Social CRM, despite all the definition wars and blogging over the past year or more. Why is it that there is no place for one group-authored definition? Or will we leave that to Wikipedia?
Another point I'd like to make is that I don't believe business people care all that much about these distinctions. And I say this based on a survey we recently conducted. There is value in Social CRM, social media marketing, and Enterprise 2.0 -- and plenty of gray areas between them.
Business managers are not all that interested in these debates. Rather, they want to know how will they get value from social media in business. We launched www.socialbusinessone.com earlier this year to try to bring these different factions together, but instead it seems like specialists in each area would prefer that they remain separate and distinct.
A marketing manager, for example, might need to do a social campaign like Old Spice to build the brand and maybe increase sales too (social media marketing). But also use social media to build relationships with existing customers (SCRM). And use social tech to improve internal collaboration (E20). Same manager, three different applications for social media.
As industry leaders, we need to do more to bring order from this chaos, don't you think?
John Moore
Well said Bob
Dead on Bob, I agree with you. Lets all continue to use our distinct approaches to move the ball forward so that everyone, ourselves included, can continue to learn and add more value in the process.
John F Moore
Founder and CEO
The Lab
My Blog: http://thejohnfmoore.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/JohnFMoore
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/johnfmoore
Skype: cto.john.moore
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